Carry the Flame

by James Jaros

  “It’s just like when it rained,” Ananda said quietly as they walked back, raising the specter of happier times when everyone in their camp had danced in the rare downpours and drank all they could, when clouds brought holidays from sun and grit and thirst.

  Jaya and Erik formed a makeshift table from a long board they’d scavenged from the debris, setting it up so the truck blocked the view of the desolation. Jessie glanced at Augustus and his girls, and felt horrible about having to feed the caravan so close to the source of their grief. But if they didn’t have dinner now, they’d have to eat in the dark—and risk luring all kinds of predators.

  Brindle, Gilly, Bella, and Imagi loaded the table with two crates of food, one that had yet to be opened. Imagi drummed the board and clapped happily, and Jessie couldn’t help wondering if her Down syndrome, in this world, was actually a blessing.

  “I d-don’t kn-know what th-this s-s-stuff is,” Brindle announced after prying open the sealed crate. “Some k-kind of m-m-mystery m-meat. B-But it’s b-b-been smoked, and it s-smells ok-ay.”

  Probably more lizard, Jessie thought. Or some kind of reptile.

  The flavor came back to her slowly; more than twenty years had passed since she’d tasted it. “Chicken?” she exclaimed. She stared at the knife she used for eating. “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s really good,” Ananda said, putting aside a book of letters that she and Burned Fingers had found in an abandoned house not long after her abduction. A father had written them to his daughter on her birthday about the big events of her life in the past twelve months. But in the last letter—before all the blank pages—he said there were “problems” in the country.

  Ananda loved to reread them, even though they bored holes in her heart with their portrayal of a world filled with orchards, movies, soccer games, dances on a real stage, summer concerts in a grassy park—so many wonders—horses, skiing, snow!—that she’d spent days daydreaming about them all.

  But right now not even the sweetest heartache could compete with the taste of chicken. She’d never eaten fowl, though her mother had taught them about grouse so slow “you could hunt them with a rock,” and pheasants so pretty that people spent lifetimes painting pictures of them. Where are those pictures? Ananda wondered. What happened to them all?

  And once, there had been geese and wild turkeys and dozens of species of ducks. Solana, sitting a few feet away and still recovering from deep machete wounds inflicted by a marauder, had drawn all kinds of birds in the dust for one of the camp’s history and science classes; after the collapse, Ananda’s mother said the two subjects never should be taught separately again. Solana was her mom’s closest friend, an auntie to Ananda and Bliss.

  The pretty, oval-faced woman sat across from Burned Fingers, long black hair falling over her back and shoulders, hiding most of the fat red scars. She had never spoken to him. Neither had Maureen and Keffer Gibbs, whose three children also had survived. Ananda watched Solana chew slowly, savoring her food. So were many others.

  Jessie also noticed the rare pleasure people took in eating, even Callabra, the strong sixteen-year-old whose tongue had been taken by the beastly men at the Army of God. Jessie suspected that for the adults, it wasn’t simply because the meat was immensely flavorful, especially compared to lizard loins. It was knowing that chicken actually existed somewhere.

  Hannah confirmed her suspicion by asking Burned Fingers where the Army of God had gotten the meat. At his insistence, they’d taken considerable risks to abscond with all the food they could find at the fortress.

  “Not sure,” he told the gray-haired nurse, who kept a six-inch steel spike hidden in her thick braid. “Those crazies were dealing with lots of traders, and I heard some of them came all the way down from New England and what use to be Canada. Look,” he turned to the others, “I hate to break this up but we’ve got to get moving.”

  Gilly and Bella, best friends since early childhood, asked if they could take their portions onto the truck so they could make the meat last even longer.

  “Sure, fine, eat on the go,” Burned Fingers said. “Used to be America’s favorite pastime.”

  “It was?” Gilly asked, stunned.

  Jessie watched him spring to his feet without answering the girl’s question, though he was quick to nod approval at Brindle and Jaya for immediately packing up the food crates; and he offered Erik a “Good move!” when the young man loaded the scavenged board onto the roof of the van.

  The trailer rumbled when Maul fired up the truck engine; Jessie felt it all the way through her body as she perched on the walkway atop the gasoline tanker, once more studying the land they were leaving.

  They followed the van up the slope, using heavy ramps to negotiate sudden eruptions or erosions of the road. They reached the crest with just enough light to give them the expansive view promised by arduous days of climbing out of a deep Appalachian valley.

  All around them the air looked smoky, like the namesake mountains themselves. To the east they spied sheered-off peaks, blown up and bulldozed apart for the last veins of coal in North America. Entire mountaintops were blasted open so more 300-million-year-old fuel could be torn from the earth and burned into the corrupted sky, adding gigatons of carbon to the greenhouse gases widely known to have been heating up the planet. The crimes against nature—against humankind’s own best interests—were staggering to Jessie, inconceivable, and for what? To eke out a few more decades of extortionate profits for a self-immolating economic and industrial system?

  She noticed most of the caravaners staring at the scarred mountains, criminal evidence that would last eons—and the dismal legacy of the most reviled generations in history. Little wonder mobs hunted down and viciously executed aging CEOs and political leaders, then targeted media sycophants and phony populists who’d played their fellow citizens for fools—and paid dearly for their duplicity. Or that the graveyards of the wealthy were defiled, bodies exhumed in spasms of hatred. Nothing remained sacred. Lavish mausoleums, gold-plated banks, and marble-halled trading houses were all defaced with the rebellion’s loudest cry: KILL THE 1%$!, red-painted graffiti that spoke dozens of languages as it traveled the world wielding its vengeance.

  Ananda took her mother’s arm, asking, “Are those lakes?”

  “Sludge ponds,” Burned Fingers answered. “Must be solid poison by now. Let’s hope it doesn’t get windy.”

  “Ponds?” Jessie said. “They look like the Great Lakes of Death.”

  Below them, lost in the haze about twenty miles away, lay the border of the Great American Desert, endless and mostly flat, once home to tens of millions of bison, dozens of native grasses, an uncountable number of songbirds, and more than thirty Native American tribes.

  After exterminating most of the flora, fauna, and First Nation’s people, American settlers turned it into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world—by the short measure of monoculture. But temperatures rose disproportionately higher in the country’s interior, a jump long predicted by climate scientists, and roundly denounced by farm-belt politicians and the Ph.D.’s they persuaded with all the perks of wealth. Their collective refusal to acknowledge the region’s decline continued even as the Great Plains turned to desert, a despoilment accelerated by a finding long reported by hydrologists: the twentieth century was anomalously moist in much of the Midwest and western U.S.

  When climate chaos and higher temps were added to the volatile mix of a rejiggered environment and drier conditions, the Great Plains agricultural bubble burst.

  The reign of wheat, corn, soybeans, and hogs proved predictably brief, from Jessie’s perspective as a wildlife biologist. The yardstick of millennia no longer applied when the calculus included humanity’s impact on the infinite interlocking of all life.

  “I’m thinking we should pass on lighting a torch,” Burned Fingers said to her. “What do you think?”

  He wasn’t really asking, just reaffirming their co-leadership after ta
king full command to stop the tank. She appreciated the impulse and nodded. Who knew what was lurking out there?

  The Gibbses had guard duty tonight. Jessie handed Keffer her M–16. His wife, Maureen, an accomplished gunner in her own right, would work the second half of the shift. Jessie reminded him to watch for panther packs.

  “I’m still worried about the Pixie-bobs.” He brushed light hair out of his face, and she remembered finding the Gibbses and their three children playing possum under the dead bodies of their compatriots the morning after the camp had been attacked.

  “We should be leaving the P-bobs behind,” she told him. “They’re more mountain animals. The panthers roam a lot farther.”

  “I’m so sick of cats,” Keffer said.

  “You and me both.”

  “You see where little Cassie found herself a Pixie-bob kitten?”

  “What?” Jessie blurted.

  “Yeah, and she’s planning on keeping it.”

  Not going to happen. Jessie marched right over to the truck and found the towhead at the center of a group of girls gathering under the trailer.

  “Hand over the cat,” she ordered.

  “Mom! It’s so cute,” Ananda protested. Teresa and M-girl glared at her.

  Pick your battles carefully, Jessie warned herself. What was she going to do anyway? Wring its little neck in front of them?

  Cassie bent over her kitten protectively.

  “May I see it?” Jessie asked.

  “Sure.” Cassie smiled, lifting it up proudly.

  Yes, a soft, furry kitten—and to Jessie’s eyes, evil looking. “Where’d you find it?” she asked.

  “Wandering around. I think you killed its mama,” Cassie said darkly.

  “Before its mama could kill us,” Jessie could not refrain from saying.

  “But we can show it a different way to be,” the girl insisted.

  “How are the dogs taking it?” Jessie asked the group. Now that she’d seen the kitten, she realized that Hansel and Razzo had been ornery of late. It galled her to find that the hounds had known about the Pixie-bob before she did. But how could they not be aware of a mortal enemy, in the most exact sense of the term?

  “Not real well,” Ananda said. “I think they want to kill it.”

  At least they’ve got their priorities straight. “So what are you planning to do with it?” Jessie asked Cassie in as calm a voice as she could manage.

  “Protect it,” the child said emphatically. “Just till it gets older. Then it can take care of itself.”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “And it’ll still be nice to us,” Cassie said. “You’ll see.”

  You’re never going to win this one, Jessie told herself. Everyone adored little Cassie. The girl’s mother had been murdered during an attack on their camp down near the Gulf Coast, and her father was gunned down trying to take control of the gasoline tanker at the Army of God. She was everybody’s favorite orphan, especially Maul’s; the big truck driver’s own daughter had been killed, and Cassie was the only child of his closest friend.

  “Let’s see how it goes,” Jessie said, leaving herself a small opening. “I want everyone to bed down.”

  Cassie nodded, eager to snuggle with her kitty. Jessie reminded herself that not too long ago Pixie-bobs were house cats.

  Till they got a taste for wild living—and people.

  In the morning, Jessie found Maureen sleeping on her watch. She nudged her, and Keffer’s wife flushed as red as her hair, apologizing profusely before adding quickly, “But there’s no excuse. I know that. Did anything happen?”

  Jessie shook her head and walked away with her automatic rifle, thinking that Maureen, with more kids than anyone else, might be too worn-out for guard duty; no matter how sharp her aim, she was useless if she was too tired to stay awake.

  The caravan started winding down to the desert, brakes screeching murderously on both the tanker truck and van.

  “If we can make it down without losing control of this thing,” Maul said, climbing into the cab after a short break, “we should be set for a long way.”

  His words spooked Jessie, leaving her to imagine the truck barreling down the hill without brakes, children clinging desperately to the struts and ladders. But by mid-afternoon the worst of her immediate fears hadn’t materialized, and she accepted that the truck’s mechanics—whoever they were—had done a credible job of keeping the decrepit looking vehicle in reasonable operating condition.

  Now they were heading down the last stretch of uninterrupted roadway. Without question, they’d covered more distance than on any other day.

  When the slope gentled and Maul braked, Jessie grasped the enormity of the journey ahead. Except for rolling hills, the horizon looked unbroken for a thousand miles, and everywhere she gazed she saw heat shimmers, so many it was as if she had a visual disorder.

  Bella and Gilly, the first as light-haired as the second was dark, jumped from the tanker, scrambling to uncover a stub they saw sticking through the dust.

  Burned Fingers ordered them to freeze, warning that the stub could be hiding a land mine.

  But sometimes a stub is just a stub, Jessie said to herself after he found that it formed the top of a barbed wire fence post.

  And who would want to waste mines out here?

  All the girls began to uncover posts. It quickly became a game as they raced farther and farther afield.

  Burned Fingers eyed the buried fencing and said, “I guess the oceans aren’t the only things rising.”

  “This is the same thing that happened in the Dust Bowl.” Jessie stooped to scoop away soil, unearthing the top of a tumbleweed. “These things would roll into a fence, and the more dust they caught, the more they’d block.”

  She slapped the sandy soil from her hands and stood. “And then, a century later, it started happening again. Miles of fencing would go under in a few years.” She stared at the emptiness before them, girls running and laughing in her lateral vision, making her smile for a moment.

  “They tried planting millions of salt cedar trees to try to block the wind, but they sucked huge amounts of moisture out of the soil.” Bliss, Ananda, and M-girl started listening in, and Jessie found herself becoming more consciously tutorial. “Those trees were non-native, but back when it was still raining some, you could get away with using them. But when the rains just about disappeared, those trees sucked out every last drop, and the soil turned to dust. Then the pigs started getting loose from huge farms, or they were let go because nobody had any food to feed them anymore, and they foraged everywhere, which loosened up the dirt even more.

  “That’s when it really started blowing. It made the Dust Bowl look like a sneeze, and these fences weren’t the only things disappearing.” She glanced at the posts. “Entire towns got buried. It was one mistake compounding another. Stuff like this happened thousands of ways all over the world.” She looked at the desert. “This is what we got in the end.”

  “Was it like this before they started farming?” M-girl asked. The fifteen year-old’s name was Miriam, but her deceased parents always called her M-girl, and so did everybody else. “Originally, I mean.”

  Jessie quickly told her about the Great Plains before the settlers arrived.

  “Do you think anything’s living out there now?” M-girl sounded frightened, and Ananda pulled her close. The blisters on M-girl’s hands and feet had healed nicely since her rescue of Ananda and Teresa from an Army of God attempt to burn them as witches.

  “I doubt much of anything is living out there,” Jessie said. “But we don’t know for sure. The reason I doubt it is the more biomass you have, the more opportunities organisms have to adapt, in a Darwinian sense. Someone said that a long time ago, and looking out there, I don’t see much biomass, so I don’t see a whole lot of opportunity for life to adapt and survive.”

  “Biomass?” Ananda asked. Jessie felt certain it was on M-girl’s behalf, because her daughter certainly kne
w the meaning.

  “Everything that’s alive out there, or in any place.”

  For Jessie, each explanation of a scientific concept was underlaid by the tragic sense that no matter how diligently she tried to pass on her knowledge, she’d never be able to share more than a fraction of what she’d learned in her many years of schooling. It pained her to know that this heartbreaking devolution of education and understanding was probably taking place wherever humans survived.

  “It makes me doubtful about water,” Burned Fingers said. “We’re going to be rationing all the way across this stinking desert. It’s hard to believe there’s any out there at all.”

  Harder still to believe it two hours later when they came upon the first skeletons. A group of five had died, though the only evidence at first was a partially uncovered skull spotted by Zita Gibbs, Keffer and Maureen’s flame-haired eleven year-old. The poor girl screamed when she saw it and ran to her mother as soon as the truck stopped.

  Nearby, Jessie and Burned Fingers found four other skeletons under a thin layer of crumbly dirt. No sooner had they started rolling again than half a dozen girls spotted a pile of bleached bones and skulls sticking out of the whitest sand Jessie had ever seen. Hannah thought they’d found a small plague pit, but that didn’t strike Jessie as likely. The pits were usually huge, well-organized mass graves for those killed by Wicca, or by the hallucinatory violence the virus unleashed in its victims.

  Burned Fingers waved her over. “I did a quick count,” he said. “There’s at least forty of them.”

  She joined him poring over the bones, finding it odd that the skeletons hadn’t been eaten. Then she realized dozens of them could have been dragged off already. More bones than takers.

  The children and other adults stood back, perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of recognition that Jessie and Burned Fingers each possessed their own expertise when it came to the dead.

  Without a word, she knew they were searching for a cause of death other than the harsh desert conditions. How likely was it that so many would have ventured out so unprepared? And where were their packs and tents—any of their possessions? Even a scrap or two.